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WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: Are Better Communications Possible?

Analysis by Marcelo Pereira

MONTEVIDEO, Feb 1 2005 (IPS) - Next year, when the World Social Forum (WSF) is "decentralised" and held in a number of different and still undetermined venues around the globe, the need to remedy the event’s ongoing deficiencies in communications, both internal and external, will be even more pressing.

According to WSF organisers, there were some 155,000 participants at this year’s edition of the giant civil society meet, which wrapped on Monday in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

Of that total, 6,880 were accredited as members of the press, but this impressive ratio of one journalist for every 22.5 people in attendance did not resolve the serious communications problems that have consistently plagued the WSF.

Professional journalists from the mass media were forced to adapt, once again, to the lack of a traditional "press office".

Because the WSF does not have directors or spokespeople (or even special guests, at this year’s edition), there is no specific structure for selecting "main events" to be promoted from among the plethora of activities (2,500 in all this year) or for attempting to summarise each day’s happenings.

This gargantuan task falls to each individual journalist. But even before tackling the daunting challenge of deciding what is and isn’t "important", they must first try to get a handle on a general overview of events, a practically impossible goal.


The WSF is not conceived in such a way as to facilitate an overview of what takes place there, yet reporters typically attempt to approach the meeting from this perspective, or present it to their audience as if they had.

In today’s world, and perhaps also in the "other possible world" that the WSF is aimed at creating, no one would be interested in news reported by someone who admitted being lost in a veritable whirlwind of events.

As a result, it is no surprise that a "manifesto" presented on Saturday by a group of 19 renowned personalities attending the WSF was given preferential coverage by the mainstream media, despite the fact that it was not an official declaration by the Forum itself.

In the absence of actual spokespeople, journalists seek out famous names and faces, particularly those that have been associated with the WSF since its inception. And it is hard to convince a major international news network that no single person can be considered particularly "representative" of the multitude.

An extremely interesting segment of the world population comes to the Forum, but the Forum has still not solved the problem of how to reach the world – not even that portion of the world that forms part of it. Participants wander from tent to tent, attending a fraction of the activities scheduled, and learning what happened in a few others through word of mouth.

How many people heard about the harsh criticism of the Brazilian-led military intervention in Haiti, voiced at a press conference shortly after 4:00 p.m. on Saturday by Joao Pedro Stédile, the influential leader of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement?

And who should decide if this story, or any other reflecting the heated internal debates within the Brazilian left, is more or less important than, for instance, the condemnation of the atrocities committed in Chechnya voiced in the same venue, several hours earlier, by Chechen lawyer Lydia Yusupova?

This year, internal communications were better organised than in previous editions, due to coordination between alternative media that agreed at the end of each day on which activities would be particularly important to cover the following day.

But there was no reason to consider these agreements as representative of the broad diversity of the Forum, and some may even complain that they imposed negative limitations on the coverage.

Moreover, how many of the participants actually had access to these alternative media? Connecting to the Internet in the WSF "territory" was not easy, not even for accredited journalists.

While panellists spoke in the Forum of the new information technologies and the challenges of the 21st century, effective internal circulation of messages depended mainly on paper.

Newspapers, leaflets, or simply handwritten notices tacked up on a tree in the enormous WSF youth camp were often more useful tools than the worldwide web when it came to drawing attention and people to a specific event or activity.

If next year’s WSF is to be a decentralised event held simultaneously on several continents, rather than a series of independent regional forums, the problem of internal communications becomes absolutely crucial, especially in terms of interactivity. And there will be no way to solve the problem with paper.

As in the WSF that ended Monday in Porto Alegre, the crux of the problem does not lie in technology, but can be found at the crossroads between ideology and organisational policy.

The means exist for linking up distant simultaneous meetings. But there is no way to broadcast everything to everyone at the same time, and someone, somewhere, will have to establish priorities.

With respect to external communication on WSF events, the first question is how much importance is really assigned to this aspect. A local television channel in Porto Alegre dedicated its air time almost completely to the WSF, but the Forum’s organisers did not appear to be very interested in keeping a close eye on this coverage, which shaped the host city’s perceptions of the giant civil society gathering.

Is it merely assumed that the alternative media present at the Forum will take on the role of being a link to the "outside world"? Or is little importance put on the public who only receive their news through the mass media? The first idea seems impracticable, and the second would exclude the great majority of humankind.

It is clear that the decentralisation proposed for next year’s WSF would open up spaces for new television stations with an international focus, which are much closer to the Forum than the large commercial networks, but do not necessarily share similar characteristics with the WSF.

These broadcasters, like TV Brasil or Venezuela’s TeleSur (in which Argentina is also expected to participate) are "alternative" in the same sense as the Qatar-based Arabic language broadcaster Al-Jazeera, with respect to the major U.S. networks.

But media outlets with strong state support, like Al-Jazeera itself, emerge from decisions adopted by governments, and will inevitably be sensitive to their whims, even if they share the intention of being a vehicle for broadcasting the expressions of civil society, and whether they have a political or cultural focus.

The WSF organisers and the countless groups and individuals involved in the entire process thus have one year to prove that "another kind of communication is possible".

 
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